Alternatives to Google Analytics

What would work for a medium to high volume site?

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robho

10:05 pm on Nov 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

I'm looking for an alternative to Google Analytics. Although it's been working fine for years, I'd prefer not to rely on Google for this (actually, I'm surprised they still let me have it for free, I'm way over their page views limit).

My busiest site has around 700,000 non-robot page views a day (plus many more from robots) and a very large number of unique pages. It's load balanced across two separate servers.

It's a web application site, not ecommerce, so all I really need are some grand totals, a way to compare trends over days/weeks/months, and where the traffic comes from (ideally with keywords). Don't need goals. Don't need anything real-time (with 1000-2000 simultaneous users most of the time that doesn't really have a use). As it's not ecommerce, the budget for this is small (free is nice).

I took a look at Piwik but I think I'd need another server or two just for that (since it generates a database write for each page, I have 10-20 page views a second). Same for OWA.

Years ago I used Analog but that seems to be unmaintained now. I ran a test of Awstats on a smaller site and the geo side especially seemed to be inaccurate. However, it's still top of the list (I'd need to merge logs from both servers for any logfile solution like that).

Have I missed any other analytics services (other than costly commercial ones like Woopra) from this list? Any other suggestions?

Rob

aspdaddy

7:35 pm on Nov 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

Have you looked at Crazy Egg, its used by many clients I know that that have outgrown Google Analytics. It helps them focus on a few key metrics.

They have a good offer - Increase your conversion rate or the revenues of your website within the next 30 days... or your money back

robho

9:34 pm on Nov 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

Crazy Egg looks only suitable for small sites, even their most expensive standard option maxes out at just over 8,000 visits per day, 100 pages, and the custom options (which would certainly be way over budget!) can only do up to 2 million visits a month.

My site I mentioned earlier gets hundreds of thousands of visits a day (around 6 million a month).

I've now been thinking it might make sense to sample my data rather than log everything. I could put a Piwik tag on for say a random 1% of all page views (every page is dynamic so this would be easy).

It would give me a sampling margin of error, but much more managable stats (200,000 page views a month rather than 20 million, an update every few seconds rather than 10-20 per second). Does anybody else do this, for their larger sites?

wheel

9:38 pm on Nov 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

Lyris Clicktracks has some type of product. I've got a version I bought from them way many years ago, no idea what they've got now.

And this is fairly random, but I was just looking at the site of a large corporation, and I see a 'xiti' tag. I'll let you trace down the company behind it. No idea about them other than I saw them on a site. The same site also had G analytics installed, but that may just be because the corp. is clueless.

robzilla

3:10 pm on Nov 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Me too, wheel. I'm thankful I bought the cheapest version back then, though even that package was ridiculously overpriced -- and based on log files (i.e. largely inaccurate). Obviously, that's the least resource intensive way to get some statistics, but if you want something accurate and cheap, stick with Google Analytics.

aspdaddy

5:32 pm on Nov 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Crazy Egg is used by very large sites, the 80/20 rule applies in analytics. What are you actually trying to achieve with the analysis?

If you only care about aggregated stats, you can also search for "website counters" within Google.

hippypink

7:22 am on Dec 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

Clicky might be a good, and cheap option.

Host with someone that gives you Urchin for free (e.g. Softlayer), although not sure how much extra processing power is needed for a busy site like yours.

hippypink

7:24 am on Dec 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

yes, setting a sample rate would be fine too, although 1% is probably a bit low. maybe 10 - 20% is better

timsoulo

9:41 am on Dec 20, 2011 (gmt 0)

wow! seems you have a nice idea of a startup here! :)

why don't you hire some freelance developers (they're cheap in Ukraine, India, Phillipines) and have them create a tracking software which will cover everything you need.

then you can contact other huge sites with same issues and offer them a subscribtion :)

I would probably steal the idea and do that myself, but I don't know what it's like to own such a monster site :)

sunnyujjawal

10:42 am on Mar 3, 2012 (gmt 0)

@robho: Stat Counter

Mario155

5:26 pm on Mar 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

Stat Counter is the only other major on besides GA that I have heard of. I also download my web logs from my server and view them with a log program. Sometimes those are good to track ip addresses and bots.

Digmen1

9:06 pm on Mar 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

yes I use Stat Counter, it can be free, and it is much easier to use.

Digmen1

9:08 pm on Mar 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

@Robho

Why worry about anything if you have 700,000 views a day.

abk717

2:28 pm on Apr 9, 2012 (gmt 0)

There is Omniture as well, but is more costly. May be worth a look if the site is that big and needs better reporting with service. Also, I recently saw GA offering a paid subscription, but from what I recall it was quite expensive.

Shatner

5:51 pm on Apr 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

Chartbeat is a good replacement for the Live part of Analytics. It actually does that a lot better.